Imagine a ceilidh that could wake the dead. That’s
exactly what Gaelic-language-based theatre company Theatre Gu Leor have done in
Ceilidh, a new play by Catriona Lexy Campbell and Mairi Sine Chaimbeul, which
the company take out on an extensive cross-country tour from this week as its
biggest work to date.
Despite the implications of the show’s premise, the
dead are only stirred from their celestial slumber to reclaim a once spontaneous
social gathering which has been hi-jacked by big business types. Such shameless
profiteers are intent on shoving out the local villagers on Harris to make way
for luxury bothies and an exclusive golf course to entertain the high-end
tourist trade. Only flame-haired 17th century poet Mairi Ruadh, it
seems, can stop such cynical efforts to co-opt culture as a means of
gentrification and social cleansing.
“In the Gaelic landscape she’s pretty much an icon
with legendary status,” says Ceilidh’s director Muireann Kelly of Ruadh Mairi
Ruadh, or, to give her full name, Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruadh, which literally
means Mairi daughter of red-headed Alasdair. “She was supposed to have been
buried face-down, and when she was alive had been banished to Mull because of
some of the things she wrote. She’d been a nurse to the MacDonald clan, and
wrote a poem to one of them. The way she wrote was quite emotional, and that
wasn’t the done thing, especially as she was a woman. There was a thing as well
that she wasn’t allowed to write indoors, nor outside in the village, so she
had to write on the lintel of the door, effectively balanced precariously
between these two worlds.”
This is
something Gaelic speakers are probably used to. It is also something Kelly and
Theatre Gu Leor are trying to address through a wide-ranging series of schools
and community workshops and access programmes to go along with the show itself,
which is performed with English surtitles.
“This is much bigger than just getting the show on the
road,” says Kelly of a production that opens in the Tron Theatre’s Victorian
bar, the same venue that David Greig’s globe-trotting ‘ceilidh-play’, The
Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, began its life. “We wanted to go back to the
original meaning of the word, ceilidh, which is about being a social thing, or
just having a bit of a gossip. As a Gaelic theatre company as well, we didn’t
want to be labelled as a company who just did work about Gaelic. We want to do
contemporary work that’s accessible to everyone, but just happens to be in
Gaelic. It’s important that we’re part of a wider Scottish network. You can’t
just exist in a bubble. You need to bring people in.”
As an actress, Kelly has numerous stage credits,
including playing Molly Bloom in the Tron Theatre’s production of Ulysses, and she
has performed an Irish Gaelic version of Pauline Goldsmith’s Bright Colours
Only. Kelly is also learning Gaelic, as is Ceilidh’s director Lewis
Hetherington, whose partner is a native speaker, and who has cast Kelly as Mairi
Ruadh.
“She’s a really interesting character to use as a vehicle
to explore all these questions,” says Kelly. “There’s obviously a connection to
the past, and to story-telling, and it raises questions as well about a woman having
a voice. That’s juxtaposed with how culture is being bought up, and what the
word ceilidh means now. My kids are Gaelic speakers, and I want to know what it
means.”
Theatre Gu Leor (Theatre Galore) was formed in 2014 by
Kelly after being approached by David MacLennan, the late founder of Oran Mor’s
A Play, A Pie and A Pint lunchtime theatre programme.
“David wanted a Gaelic play for Oran Mor,” says Kelly,
“but he didn’t want a traditional historical one. He knew my kids went to a
Gaelic school, and said if I ever had a more contemporary thing, then we could
maybe look at putting it on.”
The result of this was Doras Duinte (Closed Door), a
contemporary thriller by Catriona Lexy Chaimbeul, which ended up being a
co-production between A Play, A Pie and A Pint, Theatre Gu Leor and Mull
Theatre. Following its Oran Mor run, Chaimbeul’s Hitchcock-style two-hander
went on an extensive Highland tour.
Next up, aside from some puppet-led yoga at the Mod in
Stornoway, was Shrapnel, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Tormod
Caimbeul, and long regarded as an iconic piece of contemporary Gaelic
literature.
“If it had been translated into English, it would
probably have a much higher profile in Scottish literature,” Kelly observes of
the book, an existential thriller set in 1970s Leith. “It has the same sense of
anarchy about it as Alasdair Gray’s Lanark. Doing something like that, again,
it turns what people might presume Gaelic theatre to be on its head.”
Shrapnel was dramatised by Chaimbeul, who also happens
to be Caimbeul’s daughter. Keeping it in the family even more, Chaimbeul’s
co-writer on Ceilidh, Mairi Sine Chaimbeul, is her mother.
The tour of Ceilidh has been enabled by Bord na
Gaidhlig, the public body set up under the Gaelic Language (Scotland Act) to
promote and develop the language. Significantly, Kelly says that Theatre Gu
Leor is the first theatre company to be championed by the organisation.
Ceilidh’s concerns about the commercialisation of
culture comes at an interesting time for the company. The recent round of
decisions from Scotland’s national funding agency Creative Scotland saw the
company become a Regularly Funded Organisation (RFO) for the first time. Given
the controversy over some of the other decisions, which saw all children’s
theatre companies and disabled companies lose RFO status, only for Creative
Scotland to be forced into an embarrassing U-Turn as five of the companies had
their funding reinstated, the experience has been bittersweet for Kelly.
It was, she says, like “winning the lottery at a
funeral.”
The feeling was heightened by the fact that Theatre Gu
Leor share an office with Fire Exit, David Leddy’s remarkable company, who were
cruelly cut from Creative Scotland’s RFO portfolio, with no U-Turn forthcoming.
“Obviously, we were delighted to get RFO status to try
and establish the company in the wider landscape of Scottish theatre,” says
Kelly. “We didn’t get everything we asked for, but what we did gives us three
years of some kind of security, because in order to plan anything long term,
you need that sustained investment. I’m totally conscious of the challenging
time other companies are having. Fire Exit gave us space in their office and
mentored us, and we’re really grateful for that. These are my pals and it’s
been really difficult.”
With the
relative security RFO status brings with it, Kelly and Theatre Gu Leor are
currently developing two new shows. The first, The Book of Pooni is a
collaboration with Puppet Animation Scotland about a curious cat who lives on
Canna. The second, Scotties, has been commissioned by the National Theatre of
Scotland, and, with a script by Kelly and Frances Poet, fuses Irish Gaeilge,
Scottish Gaidhlig, Scots and English to tell a story of migration and loss
through the depiction of Irish tattie howkers in Scotland during the 1930s. If
all goes well, it will tour in the autumn. In the meantime, Ceilidh is intent
on making a noise.
“Choosing to do the play in cabaret style is a
quick-fire way of getting in among people, looking them in the eye and talking
to them,” says Kelly. “All the big questions are there, but this is a narrative
of family ties and not speaking to each other enough. That’s the crux of it. If
we’re not doing that, then what are we doing?”
Ceilidh, Tron Theatre, Glasgow until Saturday, then on
tour.
The Herald, March 8th 2018
ends
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